UNITED STATES
The Raw Story
JOAN SHIPPS
24 MAY 2015
For more than a decade, Hobby Lobby billionaires provided substantial financial support to Bill Gothard, a politically influential religious leader who — among other things — founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles and the chain of Christian ‘treatment’ centers to which Josh Duggar’s parents sent him after he was caught molesting young girls.
“No one,” Gawker observed last year, “was more instrumental to [Gothard’s] now-controversial ministry than the family behind Hobby Lobby.”
Hobby Lobby founder David Green and his family are committed donors to evangelical Christian causes. Mother Jones reports that the Greens sold Gothard — for $10 — a 2,250-acre campus in Big Sandy, Texas, complete with landing strip and aircraft hangar. The Greens further gifted Gothard a 529,717-square-foot building Little Rock, Arkansas, and a campus in New Zealand.
In 2003, Josh Duggar took his son to the Basic Life Principles Training Center in Little Rock for counseling on Christian values and sexuality. Gothard resigned from the Institute he helmed in 2014 amid allegations by more than 30 women that he touched them inappropriately.
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